I was rummaging through my old docs and found a sales brochure for the
MicroBee computer originally released in kit form by Applied
Technology. The model PC85 is advertised as "putting advanced computer
technology in the hands of Hackers, Hobbyists and Horticulturalists
...".

Obviously the word "hacker" had a different, benevolent meaning in
those days. Nowadays "cracker" and "hacker" are used interchangeably.

As past Secretary of MUGWA (Microbee Users Group of WA) I have a
50 or so Microbees of various models in my shed mostly working
(many rescued from people who were giving them away or going to
send to the tip). The hacker term was originally applied to
those of us who cut code but it was apparently derived from a
MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) term for a clever
trick (see Stephen Levy's book "Hackers - Heroes of the
Computer Revolution" for more on this and the early days of home
computing etc).

I can remember feeling very insulted when some person on a ABC
radio programme promoting their new start up anti- piracy
computer security firm on the basis that MUGWA openly promoted
itself as a club for hackers and claiming it was promoting
software piracy. He didn't know the original meaning of the term
and the way the club was using it. We should have taken him for
libel or slander. In fact I met several commercial programmers
through MUGWA and accordingly have always been vigorously anti
software piracy and can say I have never knowingly had any
pirated software in my house.

Yes, a great read.
Hacking isn't just about computers, every true hacker is adept at other
skills such as lock picking and phone phreaking, and they supposedly
follow the "Hacker Ethic". The famous MIT guide to lockpicking came
about from those early hacker days.

One of Levy's other books, "Insanely Great" about the Mac is also a
great read.

The Woz and Steve Jobs (of Apple fame) used to be phone phreakers, and
sold the infamous Blue Boxes on the MIT grounds IIRC. Probably the most
(in)famous hacker of all time, John Draper (a.k.a Capt'n Crunch) was a
good buddy of Woz & Jobs, and used to "hang out" at Apple. I love it
how Drapers word processor (EasyWriter) was officially sold with the
first IBM PC!

In high school we had a networked lab of Microbees running off a
5MB(?) hard drive (Ooo!)
MS Word was nowhere to be seen, we used WordStar and I put the
school's student records into a DBase database I wrote. Got an A for
it too. There was also this cool platform game where you had to avoid
the monsters, all in glorious green and black.

____________________________________________________
"I like to be organised. A place for everything. And everything all over the
place."